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Hugh Pickens writes "Pervasive thefts of copper wire from under the streets of Fresno, California have prompted the city to seal thousands of its manhole covers with concrete. In Picher, Oklahoma, someone felled the town's utility poles with chain saws, allowing thieves to abscond with 3,000 feet of wire while causing a blackout. The theft of copper cables costs U.S. companies $60 million a year and the FBI says it considers theft of copper wire to be a threat to the nation's baseline ability to function. But now PC World reports that a U.S. company has developed a new cable design that removes almost all the copper from cables in a bid to deter metal thieves. Unlike conventional cables made from solid copper, the GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel Cable consists of a steel core bonded to a copper outer casing, forming an equally effective but far less valuable cable by exploiting the corrosion-resistance of copper with the conductive properties of steel. 'Companies trying to protect their copper infrastructure have been going to extreme measures to deter theft, many of which are neither successful nor cost effective,' says CommScope vice president, Doug Wells. 'Despite efforts like these, thieves continue to steal copper because of its rising value. The result is costly damage to networks and growing service disruptions.' The GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel cable is the latest technical solution to the problem of copper theft, which has included alternatives like cable etching to aid tracing of stolen metal and using chemicals that leave stains detectable under ultra-violet light. However the Copper Clad Steel strikes at the root of the problem by making the cable less susceptible to theft by both increasing the resistance to cutting and drastically decreasing the scrap value."

I used to work with some fairly high powered transmitters here and there. Funny thing about large antennas is they tend to be located in lovely remote areas. Generally, the places where no one lives and consequently a great target for moronic thieves. Depending your point of you view you could say it was very fortunate our equipment always needed maintenance or was always failing. Consequently, we spent many events at an uncomfortable distance to the population. Being occupied during the day and night was a great deterrent to douche bags. (I know because after we left the thieves moved in like jackals I'm told)

On one occasion it looked like someone had started to cut the copper from air conditioning unit, but gave up for some unknown reason. Now, what I had been waiting for was an attempted theft at the coax line for any number of transmitters. There was a metric crap ton of this and the word coax does not lend credit to the thickness of these particular runs. Such an act would create an immediate alarm and nor would it be fun to be on the receiving end of the line. The return feedback during the process would disengage the transmission, but not before baking a few fleshy components.

Heh. I feel for you. Been there, done it. But I'll tell you this -- we get hit just as frequently at our big 100,000 watt FMs in Birmingham as we do at the remote sites. My colleague at the Clear Channel site right next to our FM on Red Mountain in Birmingham has video of a guy jumping the fence, clipping a handful of copper, and then gracefully jumping back over the fence, into his car and down the hill -- all in less than a minute. By the time the cops arrived, he was long gone.

The cameras at that same Clear Channel site also provided a (somewhat scary) image of a different copper thief shooting out the lights before proceeding with his theft. He got caught, though, because even though he was wearing a mask, you could see his (unmasked) girlfriend crouching in the trees. She was identified and later sang like a canary when she was brought in for questioning.

These guys know how long the police response time is and make sure they can grab and scoot before they can get caught. The deputies who investigated our big theft at a 50,000 watt AM a couple of years ago said the best way to catch them was to set a trap (but even then, they got discouraged because the thieves would spend a few months in jail, then be right back out to steal again).

The deputies told me that on a slow day, they'll actually cruise the neighborhood with the windows down, sniffing for the smell of burning plastic. Whenever thieves steal telecom cable, they often try to burn off the insulation before scrapping it to get a better price.

Most of them don't care. It is pretty obvious when someone is a copper thief.

I think anything less than full photo registration of sellers, and a bureaucracy to make sure sure no scap is being "laundered", is about the only way to stop it. However that would probably cost more than the copper thieves do.

"My colleague at the Clear Channel site right next to our FM on Red Mountain in Birmingham has video of a guy jumping the fence, clipping a handful of copper, and then gracefully jumping back over the fence, into his car and down the hill -- all in less than a minute. By the time the cops arrived, he was long gone."

If the thief only got a handful of copper and he was escaping by car, what is the chance that it actually cost him about as much in fuel and car maintenance to steal that copper as he got in scrap value? At the very least he would have made considerably more per hour to work in McDonalds.

The sad part is for this to actually be effective the thieves have to be smart enough to know the difference and when you are talking copper thieves you are usually talking methheads....not the brightest bulbs on the best of days. All they are gonna get is a shitload of cut lines followed by finding the line half melted in a ditch somewhere when brainiac figures out it isn't worth scrapping.

The return can be quite well if you know what you are doing. When I worked in Springfield, IL as an apartment maintenance guy, we had a rash of air conditioner coil thefts. So much so that on a lot of our buildings we had moved to roof mounted units. The guy stealing the copper knew exactly what to unbolt to slide that coil right out and run. We were not the only apartments to lose these, either. Even businesses were getting hit.

Unfortunately, a combination of desperation and ignorance does make thieves sometimes go after radioactive materials without realizing. And sometimes people die. The most severe such incident occurred in Goainia in Brazil in 1987 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [wikipedia.org]. Multiple bystanders were hurt. Four people ended up dying, and many more developed radiation sickness and had long-term health problems as a result. Plutonium would be a particularly bad choice in this context even if it were cheap because it looks just like a regular metal in most conditions. (And yes, I know your comment isn't really serious.)

... and that's not the only one. Here's another example [iaea.org] of thieves merrily plasma torching their way through radiation warning signs and tungsten / lead shielding to get a source to sell to the disreputable scrap metal industry. Did I mention the GIANT RADIATION WARNING SIGNS?

There are many such noted incidents, but there are many that go unnoticed. A worker at a French nuclear plant [iaea.org] bought a watch using steel pins mixed with a Co-60 source one of these idiots stole, and this was only found when he wore it to work where radiation monitoring is required. No one knows who was exposed or killed earlier in the supply chain.

As far as the poster blaming Brazil below, this happens here [nrc.gov] in the good ol' USA as well.

And this will keep happening, as long as laws are not enforced and thieves continue to have such a willing market in disreputable scrap metal dealers

More than the guilty parties have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in every single one of these incidents. Scrap metal thieves literally kill people.

I think most of the lines in question are carrying AC current. this current tends to stay at the outer surface of the wire due to something called skin effect. I'm sure the steel is just there to give the wire diameter and strength.

Transmission lines in the national electricity grid here (India) consist of steel core for strength with an outer aluminum layer for conductivity.
This solution has been in place from the time electrification started in India.

Same reason too (strength and cost). When you are talking shorter run, like in a house, where weight doesn't matter and voltage is low you go copper. The lower resistance is well worth it. However for the long haul runs aluminium wins the day, and steel at the core to strengthen it. The higher impedance does lead to a bit more loss, but then you are talking as much as half a million volts so that equalizes things a bit.

Another reason copper is used, is that copper oxidizes much less. Which is why you have special connectors for aluminum wire, and for most modern building wiring, aluminum is forbidden. (Super-simplified version)

Actually the resitance per weight is lower for aluminium than for copper. You could go for aluminium instead of copper and get less resitance by using thicker wires, and the wires would still be lighter.

You overestimate the intelligence of thieves. The word is out that cable is valuable so the average thief will carry right on stealing it.

Also by the time the thief discovers the cable isn't valuable the damage has already been done. As happens with telephone cables. Since the typical thief can't tell the difference between copper and fibre cable before cutting it.

Most power cables are NOT copper. Even the low power 220V ones coming to my house are only copper clad aluminum. they connect to a copper whip that goes from my meter to the masthead where the cable from the street goes.

From wikipedia and personal experience.....

"Aluminum conductors reinforced with steel (known as ACSR) are primarily used for medium and high voltage lines and may also be used for overhead services to individual customers. Aluminum cable is used because it has about half the weight of a comparable resistance copper cable (though larger diameter due to lower fundamental conductivity), as well as being cheaper.[1] Some copper cable is still used, especially at lower voltages and for grounding."

All they have to do is include a few thousands signs with each order that says "This cable is GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel Cable and is worthless to scrap yards"... sure, some would ignore the sign, but after a few batches would fail to get sold for much, the signs suddenly become an even better deterant than the actual cable.

We have signs like that. Our signs also point out that stealing from a federally-licensed facility could result in a federal investigation. Shoot, the Birmingham Police have their antennas on one of our big FM towers, and the thieves DON'T CARE. They get hit all the time.

The thieves will destroy the cable to determine if it's clad or pure copper, then throw aside the stuff they don't want. It still leaves *ME* with a ton of cleanup and repair to do.

That's what I love about this crap: they steal $20 worth of copper and do $10,000 of damage in the process. They'll take the three ground cables from a 700' tower (worth about $10 for scrap) -- and those grounds are what keep lightning out of my equipment. A storm rolls along and I get hammered, while they sit back with their six pack of beer and think they've done well for themselves. (Whimper.)

$10 bucks doesn't sound worth the effort and risk. If your numbers are right and they really only get $10 bucks for the cable, then that speaks to a frightening level of desperation on a part of your populace. Maybe instead of making cables harder to steal we should make citizens that don't want to steal them...

Maybe instead of making cables harder to steal we should make citizens that don't want to steal them...

At a certain point having a "welfare state" might become cheaper overall. Then most of them won't bother to steal if you provide them with food, shelter and tv/"youtube"/game consoles/parks.

Not a big difference if you're going to put those you catch in prisons where they are fed and housed...

Of course you'd also need to fix the education side to it, compulsory education for kids, free education (maybe even up to undergraduate level), free meals for school-kids. That way you don't get stuck with 20% or more of your population being under-educated and not very competitive with the rest of the world in terms of cost/ability.

Wish I had mod points. Pity the social policy says you're shit unless you can pay for your health and education. A healthy and educated population wouldn't need to steal $10 worth of copper.
Side effect from screwing the population.

Then why do north european countries with socialized healthcare and education AND social security still get hit by copper thieves?

There are always people who want still more. Claim social security and go out stealing copper to get more money. Or do you think thieves are such noble people they don't claim social security because they got another source of income?

Because we have open borders. People from former eastbloc states, who do not have any social welfare, come in and steal the copper. This must look like a harsh statement but the statistics do not lie; 90% of copper theft in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium is performed by people from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria etc. (I know, missing reference)

At a certain point having a "welfare state" might become cheaper overall. Then most of them won't bother to steal if you provide them with food, shelter and tv/"youtube"/game consoles/parks.

I'm not sure that works as well as you would imagine. Theft is still a problem in Denmark, where we do have a welfare state (of course, one should really do a comparison of Northern European countries, and try to correlate the degree of welfare state to the crime rate, but even there, ause and effect might be hard to tell apart). It seems to be mostly drug addicts and Eastern European gangs doing the theft.

Of course, if we are talking about the price of a welfare state, be sure to include the lesser amount of work hours being produced. Higher taxes means less incentive to work, and higher social benefits means lesser incentive to work. Even though people are not only economic creatures, that reduced incentive does have an effect on the amount of work people are willing to do.

I believe that many of the people involved in this kind of theft are drug users of the heavier variety. You'd do more to cut down on this problem by allowing pharmacies to administer a patient's drug of choice at market prices, as opposed to street prices. Just a hypothesis, anyway.

How about FIX the problem by requiring all scrap yards to hold scrap cable for 7 days before payout and require a real drivers license or ID. the scrapyard then posts the cable turned in to a police website so the cops can cross reference a theft with a scrap drop off, and then wait for t he guy to show up to collect his payout.

but no, we cant do that. Just like how we cant require this to happen at pawn shops.

Too true. They'll still try to cut and strip cable, if they think it's valuable. There's been a lot of cases not only in the US but in Canada where these jackasses have cut fibre links thinking they were copper.

While copper coated steel is a good idea, steel still has a market value. So these guys will simply strip the copper off, either by shaving or electrolysis. And then sell both. After all they wouldn't steal manhole covers if steel(and iron) had no value either. Really though, as long as scrap dealers are willing to look the other way for where metal is coming from it'll be easy.

Though you can bet that once the job market picks up, this type of stuff will become rare again.

These guys basically destroyed tens of thousands worth of property to make twenty dollars at the scrap yard.

On a bit of a karma note I once heard about a scrap yard theft. The guys would pull up next to the yard in a boat (it was next to the river) and haul in a bunch of copper. The next day or so they would come back to the scrap yard and sale the theft back to them.

Many, many years ago my mother worked at an iron foundry. One day she transferred a call from a scrap dealer to the president, and afterward he told her the story. The scrap dealer had called to ask if the foundry really had sent these guys to sell the pig ingots back that they had just shipped the previous afternoon, and the answer was of course "no." The dealer knew exactly who to call because several of the ingots still had his chalkmarks indicating which foundry he had sold them to!

Seems these enterprising thieves broke into the back gate from the railroad tracks, saw a large number of shiny pig ingots stacked on the back dock, and thought they were valuable (probably not knowing that pig iron was going for about $20/ton.) They must have sweated all night carrying these forty pound pigs a block and a half down the railroad tracks, then up a railroad bridge embankment, to their waiting truck. The scrap dealer also told the president that these guys had broken the springs on their truck by overloading it. Since he was keeping the thieves busy outside by having them unload the ingots from their busted truck, he asked the foundry president if he should call the police for him. The president was laughing by this time and said as long as he got his iron back, they'd been punished enough. "Hell, if they hadn't stolen from us, I'd hire them! Nobody around here works that hard!"

Right now, stealing copper is easy, and gives a high benefit. Attempts to make it harder to steal have failed, as they profit outweighs the cost. This simultaneously makes it harder to steal (steel cable is harder to cut) and sell (the average *person* doesn't even know how to do electrolysis, let alone the average thief), while also decreasing the profit (copper is about 10x as expensive as steel by mass).

This may also be worth it simply as cheaper cable - while I expect manufacturing costs are a bit higher, material costs would be far lower. If you can buy "theft-resistant" cable for half the price of pure-copper cable, why the hell wouldn't you?

the average *person* doesn't even know how to do electrolysis, let alone the average thief

The average scrap-metal salvager does, and that's all that's important. Are you operating under the flawed assumption that scrap-metal dealers will turn away obvious thieves? That's most of their business.

while also decreasing the profit (copper is about 10x as expensive as steel by mass).

Yes, so the thieves will steal more of it, or switch to something else. They're already stealing manhole covers (causing auto cra

People get real desperate when they have hungry kids. When I was a kid my father poached wild game. It was the only way we could afford meat. And my mother ground hogs feed to make bread, because we couldn't afford either bread or grain intended for human consumption. When you are in that kind of situation you do or you die. There is no other option.

Well diesel/gas/white gas fuel theft isn't anything new, or grounding rods or ac thefts either. One thing I can suggest, is if you're using a fuel dump or several. Switch your tank an cap labels, and inform your drivers of it. Meaning gas = diesel, and diesel = gas, and "mislabeled" water tanks can sometimes be mixed in too. And do it randomly, so the thieves have no idea which is which. It worked for us at a remote site when we were doing trench dumps.

We'd park our fuel buggies out in a field and leave them and people would 'help' themselves. It stopped right quick once we did that, and there was a line of cars down the road. I know plenty of farmers that do the same thing.

I'm from a third world country and I can tell you that we haven't seen copper power lines in decades. They're all made of some form of aluminium-steel combination for precisely the same reason the article is talking about. Thieves leave them alone.

Fuck, we just need to bring public caning back, or hack parts of limbs off. Those have to be for heinous things though like theft that causes damages of $5,000 or more (cane them for less). Take two fingers each time. Figure if someone can't figure out after five tries, they really don't enjoy having functional hands, and eating. Figure after the first time it'll just stop. People who steal stuff like copper won't be served by MORE education. They are out of the K-12 educational system by then, and generally methed outa their head.

Why wait for laws like this to be introduced? There are a countries that are decades ahead of the US with laws like that in place right now and if you speak to the governments there they say the laws are working wonderfully. You should move to one of those countries. Today.

That's a nice story except it's not true. If that were the case then how do you explain the fact that crime is still dropping despite cutting back on stiff sentences and releasing criminals for budgetary reasons?

Google the Bastoy prison in Norway. It looks like a damn summer camp, where the inmates can go swimming, cook their own food (they're given knives!), watch TV. Hell, their "cells" look more spacious than my old dorm room.

Criminals sent there have some of the lowest recidivism rates in the entire world. It works because the Norwegians believe in rehabilitation instead of retribution.

Removing the market for scrap copper cable might also work. Typically this stuff flows thru metals recycling yards who are only too happy to look the other way when white-van-man shows up with a half ton of scrap copper. If these recyclers. or the smaller number of up-stream buyers, had to have paper work from licensed demolition companies or power utilities tracing the copper they buy you could stop the theft very shortly, without having to wait till every mile of copper is stolen and replaced before your deterrence sets in.

A partial solution that seems to be working here in Oregon: for all scrap sales over a certain (relatively low) amount, the scrap dealer has to mail you a check rather than paying cash on the spot. Having to provide a working mailing address deters thieves, and the time delay discourages the druggies.

We desperately need that here in Alabama. At present, there are plenty of crooked scrap dealers who buy the copper, then immediately load it on trucks and take it up to Tennessee, where it's melted within a matter of days. Even if you mark the copper, it doesn't make a bit of difference. It's long gone by the time the police show up to ask questions.

So... let me ask you this, Goebbels. (Hey, if you can invoke Geoffrey, I'll invoke him right back.)

A bunch of teenage-and-twenty-something kids come into your facility with a huge bundle of telecom cable. The insulation has been burned off. You just KNOW that they're legit; right? You don't even ask for ID?

Sorry, dood, but you ARE part of the problem. Calling me a Nazi for pointing that out to you doesn't change that fact.

Copper clad steel has been used by hams for decades. It is most effective at radio frequencies, where the "skin effect" causes the current flow to exist primarily in the outermost regions of the cable. 50 or 60 Hz AC current is not high enough frequency to have much of a skin effect, so it will consequently be a poor conductor compared to solid copper. There's no doubt that it is harder to cut, though.

The benefit to steel here is making the cable stronger (longer spans) and more resistant to cutting.

I wonder about that; I thought one of the reasons they used aluminum for high-voltage power lines was because it weighs much less, and that this enabled longer spans than denser material. Steel is dense and heavy; even though it is indeed very strong, wouldn't this be a giant disadvantage for spans?

Not much current??? Ummm... better double check that. The US power line infrastructure is stretched to the breaking point. Most 21KV and up lines are running near their max rated current.

To the GP -- Aluminum is much more conductive than steel, and in power lines the cables are large enough that they have enough tensile strength to easily make the spans that power lines are designed for. Aluminum is lower loss than steel for 60 Hz. I've been making ham antennas out of CopperWeld since 1972, usually #12 solid, sometimes #10 solid. It is nassssty to cut. I use nail nippers these days, or a hack saw if I don't have a nail nipper handy. Small bolt cutters would be good. #12 soft-drawn copper doesn't stand up to icing all that well for larger antennas. CopperWeld is much stronger. (CopperWeld is the Cooper trademark, other vendors make copper-clad steel wire.) I think CopperWeld dates from around "The War", as my parents generation called it -- WW II.

Pirates use the copper in the lines to steal trillions of dollars worth of copyrighted materials. By stealing the copper, you are stealing the copyrighted materials that were transferring across them. Since we can't determine exactly how much copyrighted material was in the copper at the time, we need to assume it's at least 10 million dollars worth per foot. Since we'll never be able to recover this money from thieves desperate enough to steal copper, we simply need to authorize the RIAA and MPAA to shoot anyone suspected of stealing copper on sight.

As someone who has been hit repeatedly by these morons, a few thoughts. Radio in general offers a very attractive target to these thieves, especially (believe it or not) older installations like AM radio stations. (At low frequencies like AM, the tower itself is actually the antenna -- that's why there are insulators in the guy wires -- and the tower field is laced with gobs and gobs of soft copper that acts as the ground plane.)

1. Copper-clad steel is nothing new. Some of this is just marketroid hype (though to be fair, I don't think anyone has ever made clad *telcom* cable before). But other types of clad conductors have been common for some time -- not just to deter theft, but because of the price of copper.

2. The real problem is the scrap metal dealers. You can't tell me that they're not suspicious when a couple of teenage guys come dragging in the core from a big honkin' three phase HVAC unit. But THEY want the copper even worse than the thieves, because they turn around and sell it in ton lots at a huge profit.

3. Copper is considerably more conductive than steel. We can get away with it at RF frequencies because of skin effect (i.e., the signal travels through the "skin" of the conductor, rather than the center), but it's not a perfect solution. It's much more difficult to work with and it's easy to accidentally strip off the copper cladding, leaving you with far less desirable steel at the connection point.

4. These thieves really are morons, and yes, most are repeat offenders. They even talk to one another in jail and compare notes. When we were hammered in February of 2010, the deputies who investigated our incident told us that they even knew who most of these people were. We had video cameras and they scoured the images to get a clue as to who it was.

But sometimes I have to laugh. One of our FM stations here is in the huge metropolis of Pumpkin Center, Alabama, which defines "middle of nowhere." The house up the (dirt) road from the transmitter site has been hit repeatedly; I drove to the site to do routine maintenance a couple of years ago and noted that the air conditioner had been ransacked. But they won't mess with the FM site.

I guess the fact that our landlady likes to go out and there and shoot with her boyfriend gives them pause. The sight of all those targets with bullet holes all around the center makes them think twice.:)

Then some thieves tried to cut the gigantic, 6" copper coax going to our 100,000 FM in North Central Alabama. I posted a note that said, "Dear morons, if you try to cut this line, please have your life insurance paid up.... "

They've stolen our grounding several times since, but they haven't touched that big coax again.:)

Uh, the article does not explain what is new about this. Copper clad cable has been around forever. It has been used for High Frequency antennas where the tensile strength of the steel is important and the skin effect keeps the RF currents near the surface. I don't think there is much skin effect at the frequencies they are promoting this cable to be used for. As others have already pointed out, the problem is not limited to electric or communications cable. Plumbing, and HVAC systems are also prime targets. Better regulation of metal recycling and the prosecution of those recyclers who do "look the other way" would go a long way to stopping this problem.

Of course a few more charred bodies like was found on a building roof near here recently when a copper thief THOUGHT the 660 volt power line to the chillers was disconnected and it wasn't could also be a deterrent

And they are still addictive. There's arguments to legalize drugs. This isn't one of them. In fact, you'll discover that some of the addicts that do this are alcoholics, their drug of choice is perfectly legal.

When you combine a messed up mental state with a desire for money to pay for the addiction, you'll get people doing stupid shit. Legalization won't change that. It isn't as though someone doing legal drugs will suddenly be clear of mind and a productive member of society.

Except that the supervised drug shoots have been proven to both reduce health care costs AND to help people beat the habit when they finally get to the point where they realize it's either beat the habit or die.

Vancouvers supervised sites more than pay for themselves just in reduced emergency room care, and when the feds tried to shut them down, the Supremes ruled that it would have been both an infringement on the provinces' right to administer their health-care programs, and an infringement on the individuals' right to security of the person by putting them at increased risk of dying.

As someone who has never been into recreational pharmacology, I say just legalize it and deal with it - it's a social, not legal, problem. Or stop being hypocrites and ban alcohol, tobacco, and every other product proven to affect brain function, including coffee, tea, sugar, breakfast cereals, any product containing corn or corn by-products, chocolate (don't you DARE!!!) etc.

Seriously - the war on drugs is hypocritical. It's also one that cannot ever be won. Seriously, the way to reduce drug use is to set an example, and to keep an open, non-judgmental attitude when talking to people who chose to use drugs - not have a bunch of drug-addicted politicians pass laws against it.

In case you hadn't noticed, everything [amazon.com] is a felony these days.

But I agree that a second conviction for theft should carry a very long sentence. Many crimes are crimes of passion, committed under circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated - and many more "crimes" are not really crimes at all - but theft has real victims and thieves have a very high recidivism rate. If there is one crime that we should punish with very long vacations from polite society, it should be theft.

Really? Then you must be the ONLY person alive not to have. With so many laws on the books, it's impossible NOT to have unknowingly broken one of them, whether it's your dog mating with another dog within 1,500 feet of a public school (California [turtlezen.com]) or other such stupidity.

We had the city pass a really stupid law - because kids were holding on to the back of buses during the winter and "sledding", they passed a law making it illegal to hold on to or grasp any part of a vehicle in motion inside city limits. So how are you supposed to steer?

Ditto with the law they passed trying to ban massage parlors by defining massage as the physical manipulation of any part of another persons body - making everything from handshakes to helping your kid blow her nose.

I'm pretty sure their are jurisdictions were publishing something anonymously is illegal.

For example your post annoyed me and:"""Whoever -...

makes a telephone call or utilizes a telecommunications device, whether or not conversation or communication ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications;...

shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.""" 47 U.S.C. Â 223(a)(1)(C)

Now sure "intent to annoy" means something entirely different - but do you really know every single law that applies to you in enough detail to know you have never broken one?

I think they are more throwing a fit because he crams them into dark green korean war surplus tents in the 115 degree Arizona heat with no cooling and limited water. I think they are more throwing a fit because he also uses hot boxes as additional punishment in those conditions. I think they are more throwing a fit because he is literally running concentration camps here in the US.

Actually, it seems the NYT borrowed their content without attribution (so unlike them) from a 4-Mar-2010 article from the Joplin Globe:

PICHER, Okla. — Theft of copper from utilities and other businesses is nothing new, but officials say some brazen thieves took the crime up a notch — and should consider themselves lucky they’re not dead, even if they haven’t been caught yet.

The thieves made off with 3,000 feet of copper wire and some aluminum wire after cutting down numerous utility poles northeast of Picher, causing a temporary power outage for a handful of Empire District Electric Co. customers.

“They were sawed off at ground level with a chain saw,” Empire spokeswoman Amy Bass said of the six poles.

...

Nine residents were without power for several hours Wednesday. The lines apparently were cut about 7:30 a.m.

...

Empire District Electric Co. is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to a conviction in the copper-theft case at Picher. Officials said they are asking people who might have information about the case to call local law enforcement.

They never said anything about stainless steel, and in fact, SS would suck for wire because it's rather brittle. Copper is very ductile which is why it's so good for wire, plus, as you said, it's second best next to silver.

But yes, copper has less-than-stellar corrosion qualities (so does silver), and so does steel, depending on the alloy.

That marketing statement therefore sounds like a giant load of crap: the corrosion-resistance of copper and the conductive properties of steel sounds like a terrible wire

I say we kill all the meth addicts. Seriously. Bullet to the head and a proper burial in a pine box. People need to *FEAR* doing drugs of this variety

I got a better idea. Let's kill all the tyrants who want to imprison or murder other people because they disagree with how that person lives his life. Tired of meth addicts stealing copper? If the shit was easily and readily available (like it should be, since it's ridiculously cheap and easy to produce) then this small segment of the population could continue to exist in harmony with the rest of society.

If we're gonna start lining people up against the wall and shooting them Nazi style, then I propose we do it to the hateful, moronic, and downright IGNORANT elements in our society such as YOU. See how slippery this slope gets, and really damn fast?

You know, as an American, I will always tip my hat to the Chinese. Damn, how I envy their effectiveness at dealing with drugs abusers. They put up with none of that politically correct non-sense.

What are you babbling about? The Chinese treat addiction with rehab programs, the recidivism rate for which was 80% in the 90's (Mao 1999, 151), and is documented to be over 90% in the '00s (China Daily Youth, 27/4/04). You will need access to Lexus Nexus or a similar thing to easily follow these citations, unfortunately.

Perhaps you are thinking of their trafficking penalties. It is true that being found in possession of over a kilo of cocaine or heroin in China is often punished with the death penalty [journal.com.ph]. However, stepped up enforcement efforts are met by increased prices, inducing repair to the supply chain, resulting in no long term gain. As a result, China has been investing heavily in a multifaceted program of treatment, interdiction, social welfare targeting at-risk populations, education, rehabilitation, and diplomacy seeking to convert drug growers abroad to production of legal staple crops.

The Chinese government is already aware that they can't make significant progress solely by killing all addicts, or even just major drug traffickers - there is an unlimited supply of people who will accept any risk. Fear has become just one component of the Chinese strategy. Read up on what they're doing - in many ways, they are actually more progressive than the United States. Unlike you, they aren't entirely naïve.